🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
It’s been a long time coming, Pogues, but it finally happened.
In the penultimate episode of Outer Banks Season 3, JJ (Rudy Pankow) and Kiara (Madison Bailey) finally kiss. And not only that, but they also declare their love for each other in front of all of Kiara’s fellow “bad girls” at Kitty Hawk Adventure Therapy before escaping into the night. It’s a grand romantic gesture worthy of such a hard-fought (relation)ship sailing into calmer waters at last.
“I love that moment,” Bailey says of JJ’s daring rescue. “It means a lot, and when she sees him in that moment, it’s like, ‘He gets it. He cares too.’ He’s been playing so cool, his JJ cool, and her getting sent away really makes him realize, ‘I need to show her I care and I need to show her I’m going to be there for her, too.’”
As many of you might have thought at home, JJ and Kiara (or Kie, as the Pogues call her) could have kissed a few times this season before this. But that was all part of the plan, according to co-creator and executive producer Shannon Burke, who says that they held that card back on purpose for a bigger play later in the season.
“We’d had them kiss at least twice in the script — in Episode 3 in the boat and then in Episode 4 at the Chateau — and then pulled it back,” Burke tells Tudum. “Josh [Pate, fellow co-creator and executive producer] and I would talk about it like, ‘Should we play that card?’ And we thought, ‘No, let’s wait.’ Certainly things ran away with us, and near the end of the season, we were like, ‘Now’s the time.’” Adds Pate, “We just always knew that we wanted to have a great scene because we knew the fans were excited about it, and we were excited about it. We wanted to hold it off until we found a scene that did it justice when they finally got together.”
And fans know how long it took to get here. JJ has been trying to shoot his shot with Kie from the get-go. “Of course I’m hitting on her,” he tells John B (Chase Stokes) in the pilot, jealous that he and Kie seem to be a little flirtier than usual. “She’s a super-hot, rich, hippie chick slumming it with us... I know that door’s locked because I’ve tried it.”
JJ sabotaging his chances before he gets hurt isn’t unheard of for him. As we see in Season 3, as soon as Kiara starts to really get close, he pushes her away, calling himself a loser and asking her why she would even care about someone like him. After all, she lives on Figure 8 with her parents and was born into a Kook lifestyle.
But for Bailey, reassuring JJ of her feelings and his worth has been the crux of their relationship up to this point. “I don’t think that Kiara is so much fighting for him, but as much as she’s fighting for him to see how much she cares,” she says. “She’s just fighting to be seen by him and [for him to see] how safe he can be with her.”
JJ, as opposed to all his fellow Pogues, has never had any sense of stability. Pate claims that that’s why he’s the most devoted to the P4L mentality of leaving no Pogue behind — his friends are his family.
“He’s getting really scared,” Pankow says. “He’s really confused and worried that his friends will grow up. Just from [Pope’s] scholarship and then with John B’s dad, he was really worried throughout Season 3 being like, ‘Is his dad going to take him away from me?’”
John B and JJ have been best friends since the third grade, so it really hits home that John B’s father figure returned while his outright abandoned him. As we learn throughout the series, JJ’s father is a local drunk who beats his son before he sails away to the Yucatán for good at the end of Season 2. And while JJ knows how to be the “funny kind of glue” for the friend group, growing up he never saw what a real relationship looks like, which has made letting his guard down for Kie especially hard.
“He’s never known that,” Pankow says. “He’s seen his dad probably do really fucked up things to his mom, and that’s why she left, so he doesn’t know exactly what to do in that situation.”
JJ and Kiara’s romantic potential really bubbled to the surface for Pate in Season 1, when JJ buys the hot tub for the Pogues using stolen money after his father beats him. It’s a testament to how comfortable he feels with Kie that he’s able to let his emotional walls down and cry into her arms in a rare moment of vulnerability.
“JJ in the hot tub in the first season was one of those scenes that when it was written we all knew, ‘This one’s going to work for sure,’” Pate says.
Even before they’re marooned on Poguelandia, JJ and Kie are kindred spirits, confiding in each other that they’d rather surf around the world together than be chained to the OBX. So once they wash up in Poguelandia, it’s bliss. “Right here, we got everything we need,” JJ tells Kiara. “Just like we talked about,” she replies.
When they get back to the Outer Banks, JJ’s self-destructive behavior (like swiping Kiara’s dad’s wallet) rears its head once more while he tries to keep his feelings for her at bay. But when Kiara’s parents ship her off to Kitty Hawk wilderness therapy school (or “literally hell,” as Bailey calls it), it’s enough of a wake-up call for JJ to show up for her — in more ways than one.
“He wants to keep the family together as much as he can and has that in mind when he goes to rescue Kiara,” Pankow says. “Even though he’s probably the most immature [of the Pogues], he’s also mature in the sense of, ‘Well, I’m going to go do something about it, and I will make that action right away.’”
By Season 3’s end, after so much buildup, we find Kie and JJ a year and a half after their El Dorado victory, sitting next to each other onstage. It looks friendly, but the status of their romance is left up in the air.
“With the time jump, there’s time for stuff to blow over,” says Bailey. “Anything could have changed. The relationships that were formed in that time, specifically JJ and Kiara’s… now we jump 18 months later, and everything’s back to being ambiguous.”
Guess we’ll have to wait and see what Season 4 has in store… but in the meantime, just keep replaying that scene from Episode 9. You’ve earned it.
Season 3 of Outer Banks is now streaming.
